It amuses Allen now to think that when he first accepted the case, he figured it would be a walk in the park. He was so convinced, in fact, that when he pocketed the retainer he actually felt a twinge of Irish Catholic guilt — the strong stuff — for taking a chunk of the Lyman family fortune for a case that any ex-cop with a fax machine and a state-embossed private investigator license could probably have handled in a couple of $75 hours.
Fortunately for Allen the guilt did not last long.
Unfortunately, the case soon turned out to be a lot more difficult than Allen had imagined. If Camilla Lyman had engineered her own disappearance she had done a masterful job of it. In twenty years as a private investigator, Allen had worked on some mind-numbingly complicated cases. Over the years, he had tracked down and located people who did not want to be found, people who had the resources, both financially and intellectually, to shake any dilettante detective off the case. Yet Allen had found every single one of them. Credit card receipts, a careless signature, a chance meeting with an old acquaintance — even the best of them made mistakes. But despite his best efforts Allen hadn't found a single trace of Camilla. Not a thing. It would, he later said, take somebody with the background and training of a CIA master spy to pull off such a perfect disappearance, and whatever other attributes Cam Lyman might have had, stealth was not one of them.
There were, of course, a number of occasions when Allen thought he might have stumbled on a break in the case. A few weeks after taking the assignment, for example, he had placed the old Hopkinton house under surveillance. Knowing Cam's penchant for midnight ramblings around the estate, he paid particular attention during the hours between midnight and about 4 a.m.
One night, he and his partner spotted a large hulking figure wandering around the outside of the house. At first, they were convinced that it was Cam, but after further investigation, they determined that they were wrong. It wasn't Cam. Even now, they still don't know who it was. It is, says Allen, just one more of the unanswered questions in the Lyman case.
By the end of the year he had danced all over the country without finding any evidence that Cam Lyman had gone anywhere after her disappearance and it was slowly beginning to dawn on Allen that maybe Ted Lyman had been right. Maybe something terrible had happened to Camilla Lyman. Foul play certainly was a possibility, considering the company she was keeping.
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